Seth's Man Handles

Well that was fast. The new microinverters arrived in a few days, and so did the special tool needed for disconnecting the AC and DC cables.

The hardest part was actually removing the single mounting bolt, you can see the in the photo where on the silver bracket it attached. But I was glad I had pretty easy access to the units without needing to remove and lift the entire solar panel. This saved a lot of time.

Once detached from under the solar panel, I used the disconnect tool to pop off the three cables, then plug them in to the new microinverter. Then remount using the same bolt back under the panel.

Then comes the software bit. For each unit, you go into the installer app and “retire” it from the system. Then you add the new unit by scanning the barcode printed on its side, and assign it to a specific panel. This is done in the “Array Builder” inside the app. Because of the need to barcode scan, I actually added the unit logically first before physically mounting it.

All 9 ended taking ~90 minutes to complete. It cost only one bleeding cut on one finger, since I stopped wearing the gloves as I was going in and out of the app so many times.

Here’s the result with the upgrade. No more clipping! A nice mountain not a mesa. Getting peak output of 3.3kW vs 2.6kW before.

P.S. I sold all 9 of the used IQ8+ uinverters on eBay already. The ROI of this project is now achievable faster. Everything on eBay is now “buy it now”, the days of the auction are over?